Parallel Programming on a High-Performance Application-Runtime

High-performance application development remains challenging, particularly for scientists making the transition to a heterogeneous grid environment. In general areas of computing, virtual environments such as Java and.Net have proved to be successful in fostering application development, allowing users to target and compile to a single environment, rather than a range of platforms, instruction sets and libraries. However, existing runtime environments are focused on business and desktop computing and they do not support the necessary high-performance computing (HPC) abstractions required by e-Scientists. Our work is focused on developing an application-runtime that can support these services natively. The result is a new approach to the development of an application-runtime for HPC: the Motor system has been developed by integrating a high-performance communication library directly within a virtual machine. The Motor message passing library is integrated alongside and in cooperation with other runtime libraries and services while retaining a strong message passing performance. As a result, the application developer is provided with a common environment for HPC application development. This environment supports both procedural languages, such as C, and modern object-oriented languages, such as C#. This paper describes the unique Motor architecture, presents its implementation and demonstrates its performanc